Environmental Aliyah?
In a move heard loudly around the environmental world, the Israeli government has reached a deal with Project Better Place and Renault-Nissan for the three partners to create an electric car infrastructure throughout the holy land by 2011. Israel is cited as the perfect site for such a project due to its small size and the fact that electric cars currently can not go long distances without being recharged. The tax incentives and system are expected to make the electric car cheaper than using fuel for most drivers, given the increasing cost of fuel.
Using the pre-paid cellphone system as model, Renault-Nissan will build battery recharging stations around the country, and the government will provide tax incentives to purchasers. One of the impetuses behind the project, Idan Ofer, of Project Better Place, hopes this can be a model that will eventually go international. “If Israel will ever produce a Nokia, it will be this,” he told the NYTimes.
There are so many things wrong with this project…As an applied physics student these are the things that caught my eye.
First of all, electric cars will only have the effect of redistributing the pollution from the cities to the power plant. That’s good if you’re los angeles and suffocating from smog, but it’s not gonna do any good against global warming.
Plus when you go from fuel to electricity you end up with less than 30% of the original energy content of a gallon of fuel. So it won’t help Israel’s fuel consumption either. They’ll just redirect it to the power plant.
But the worst part is this:“If Israel will ever produce a Nokia, it will be this,â€
Are you kidding me? The only thing that Israel has to do is get out of the way in order for them to become a hi-tech ecocomy. Right now they are chasing hi-tech entrepeneurs and scientists away to america and europe. There are Israeli’s all over the place in dutch universities.
What you miss, formermuslim, is that in Israel, as in many sub-tropical countries, much of the electricity to charge those batteries could (emphasis on the possibility, the potential, not the current state of affairs…) be produced from solar generation.
If solar generation is not yet a viable choice for homes how will it be for vehicles?